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HOW EUROPE IS RESPONDING TO RUSSIAN CUTOFFS: EU members are increasingly turning back to coal, with some preparing to “burn anything” this winter if need be, in order to manage Gazprom’s throttling of pipeline gas.

Austria now plans to reactivate its coal power plant in Styria, which has capacity to generate 832 megawatts of electricity and 400 megawatts of heat for district heating, for emergency use, Euractiv reported. The plant was the country’s last to be retired in April of 2020.

The Dutch government is also lifting restrictions on power plants, enabling them to burn more coal, and urging companies to reserve energy.

Germany, whose gas flows via the Nord Stream pipeline have been cut by some 60%, is pursuing its own “painful” gas-saving plan, Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck announced over the weekend. That plan involves diverting gas volumes that would have been burned for electricity generation into storage, and burning coal instead.

For Vaclav Bartuška, the Czech Republic’s ambassador-at-large for energy security who has offered sobering outlooks on the state of play this coming winter before, the crisis is a repeat of the 1973 oil shock.

“If there is a gas cut out this winter, we will burn anything we can to keep our people warm and to make electricity,” he said.

The announcements reflect increasing desperation among EU nations trying to fill gas stores before winter, while simultaneously keeping their economies humming along and overseeing a breakup with Russian energy.

A cautionary word: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is discouraging countries against “backsliding” in their temporary reversions to coal.

“It’s a fine line,” is how she characterized responding to the energy crisis to the Financial Times. “And it’s not determined whether we are going to take the right turn.”

Welcome to Daily on Energy, written by Washington Examiner Energy and Environment Writers Jeremy Beaman (@jeremywbeaman) and Breanne Deppisch (@breanne_dep). Email [email protected] or [email protected] for tips, suggestions, calendar items, and anything else. If a friend sent this to you and you’d like to sign up, click here. If signing up doesn’t work, shoot us an email, and we’ll add you to our list.

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COMPANIES FORM SOLAR ‘CONSORTIUM’ TO POOL DEMAND: A group of energy companies are pooling together in hopes of helping to stand up more U.S. solar manufacturing, announcing that they want to satisfy demand of up to 7 gigawatts per year of homemade solar modules beginning in 2024.

The “U.S. Solar Buyer Consortium” is made up of AES Corporation and solar companies Clearway Energy Group, Cypress Creek Renewables, and D.E. Shaw Renewable Investments.

AES Corp. said it has a large backlog of U.S. solar projects, including 3.4 GW of new projects scheduled to come through 2025, and more than 10 gigawatts worth across the globe.

The consortium’s announcement follows President Joe Biden's controversial decision earlier this month to declare an emergency and exempt solar product imports from Southeast Asia from any new anti-dumping/countervailing duties for two years, functionally staving off any conclusion favoring tariffs which the Commerce Department might find as part of its active anticircumvention investigation into solar imports from the region.

Biden’s presidential memorandum carrying out the decision said he found it necessary in order to ensure that the U.S. “has access to a sufficient supply of solar modules to assist in meeting our electricity generation needs.”

Biden’s simultaneous use of the Defense Production Act, which was invoked to support production of more solar photovoltaic modules and other solar products at home, wasn’t enough to satisfy U.S. solar manufacturers, who support the Commerce probe and felt undercut by Biden’s emergency declaration.

Still need policy support: AES Corp. was among a host of companies that implored the Commerce Department to reject Auxin Solar’s anticircumvention petition.

It, like a number of U.S. solar project developers and their trade associations, has said it wants to source more of its panel components from home but that demand simply outweighs what domestic manufacturers can provide.

AES’s announcement today quoted its president and CEO, Andrés Gluski, calling for “a realistic, long-term policy framework that supports onshoring more of our solar panel supply chain without unnecessarily disrupting the growth and success of our sector.”

Translated: We want to buy American, but Congress has to enable more manufacturing — and we need the Asian products in the meantime.

YELLEN NOT KEEN ON KEYSTONE: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen dismissed any resurrection of the Keystone XL pipeline as a viable, short-term solution to address high fuel prices.

Yellen, who told the Senate Finance Committee earlier this month that energy companies have incentives now to increase production, also emphasized that the administration “[remains] committed to our climate change objectives” during a press conference in Toronto.

Keystone has become a totem of Biden’s energy policies in the eyes of critical Republicans and industry leaders, and its cancellation has taken on a new meaning now that the administration is seeking out additional oil production from less friendly allies than Canada, including OPEC nations.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Joe Manchin has encouraged Biden to support bringing back the pipeline, whose permit he canceled shortly after he was inaugurated.

A PRICE CAP FOR RUSSIAN OIL? Yellen also said that the U.S. and its allies were discussing placing a cap on the price of Russian oil.

Here’s what she said: "We are talking about price caps or a price exception that would enhance and strengthen recent and proposed energy restrictions by Europe, the United States, the U.K., and others, that would push down the price of Russian oil and depress Putin's revenues while allowing more oil supply to reach the global market.”

G-7 negotiators had been working on such a proposal, Bloomberg reported Friday, ahead of the G-7 summit beginning June 26.

US NATURAL GAS FUTURES DOWN AFTER FREEPORT BLAST: Natural gas futures opened at $6.8 per MMBtu this morning, putting the next month contract around its lowest level since April.

The reduction, which follows the June 8 explosion and fallout associated with Freeport LNG’s out-of-commission liquefaction terminal, amounts to around a 27% decrease in price since Nymex natural gas peaked at $9.32 on June 6.

European gas futures are headed in the other direction in the face of the Freeport outage and Gazprom’s supply reductions.

Dutch TTF contracts for July are above 127 euros per megawatt hour as of this writing, after starting the month around 84 euros.

SCOTUS REJECTS BAYER APPEAL OVER ROUNDUP CANCER CLAIMS: The Supreme Court this morning turned away an appeal from Bayer to dismiss legal claims that Roundup, the weedkiller product, causes cancer.

The court left in place a lower court decision awarding $25 million in damages to Edwin Hardeman, who said that Roundup caused his cancer.

Bayer, which acquired the Roundup brand when it bought Monsanto in 2018, faces massive litigation over claims that an ingredient in the weedkiller, glyphosate, causes cancer. Bayer maintains that the claims are not justified by science and that the EPA has deemed the product safe.

ARE BIDEN'S POLICIES HAMPERING DECARBONIZATION? RAILROADS SAY 'YES': “Plugged In” podcast host Neil Chatterjee and Breanne welcomed Jordan Stone, the Association of American Railroads’ assistant vice president, and Theresa Romanosky, its Assistant General Counsel, to discuss the industry's efforts to drive down greenhouse gas emissions.

Stone and Romanosky said there's more work the Biden administration can be doing to help with fuel costs and to ensure laws do not impede the railroad industry's ability to compete and innovate.

The Rundown

Financial Times EU warns against fossil fuel ‘backsliding’ as coal replaces Russian gas

Bloomberg European gas rises further as Russian cuts bring rationing risk

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TUESDAY | JUNE 21

2:00 p.m. The Wilson Center will hold an event titled “Seabed Mining, International Law, and the United States.”